The world in one word

IT’S the year of Covid-19 so it comes as no surprise that “pandemic” is indeed the declared Word of the Year (WOTY) by two esteemed dictionary publishers.

This is the annual task of English language documenters at Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster: To find that one word that had the greatest impact on the English-speaking world in a given year.

As expected, 2020 saw a slew of old and new buzzwords mostly related to you-know-what.

There have been so many that the Oxford chaps couldn’t pick just one. Instead, they came out with an unprecedented 48 words because this has been “a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”.

As Oxford Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl explained, “It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic – in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other.”

Oxford, like all dictionary publishers, track “seismic shifts in language data and precipitous frequency rises in new coinage” over the year to find their winning words.

Before I get to Oxford’s 2020 WOTY, let’s see what the others have to say.

For Cambridge Dictionary editors, their WOTY is “quarantine” because, according to its blog, “Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November), with the largest spike in searches (28,545) seen the week of March 18-24, when many countries around the world went into lockdown as a result of Covid-19.”

The word’s new currency is “a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease”, deviating from its existing meaning of “containing a person or animal suspected of being contagious.”

Collins Dictionary editors chose “lockdown” because even the very sound of it with “its heavy, clunking syllables and heavier associations” describes “the condition we’ve most dreaded in 2020 – a state of national stasis, where almost everything that constitutes normal public life was suspended.”

They add, “We’re quite literally housebound. It’s not a shock to remember, then, that lockdown was originally a piece of prison vocabulary: it’s when inmates are confined to their cells because of some disturbance on the wing.

“2020 is the year that the meaning of the word shifted irrevocably: in most people’s minds, lockdown is now a public health measure – its use having increased exponentially since 2019.”

For Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster, “pandemic” is their WOTY.

Dictionary.com says the choice was “overwhelmingly clear” – this was the one word that “kept running through the profound and manifold ways our lives have been upended – and our language so rapidly transformed – in this unprecedented year.”

Dictionary.com noted that on March 11, when the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic, searches for the word skyrocketed 13,575% compared to 2019. Merriam-Webster recorded an increase of 115,806% over look-ups on that day.

While other words like “asymptomatic”, “coronavirus”, “nonessential”, “superspreader”, “social distancing”, “frontliner” and “sanitiser” were widely searched or used, “pandemic” remained at the top for both websites.

Merriam-Webster opines that “pandemic is the word that has connected the worldwide medical emergency to the political response and to our personal experience of it all.”

Dictionary.com wryly observes that the origin of the word coming from the Greek “pân”, “all”, and “dêmos”, “people”, has proven to be so literal: “Without a doubt, the pandemic affected all of us, all over the world, in nearly all aspects of our lives.”

Oxford Dictionaries editors’ list includes new and historical words that “resurfaced with new significance” this year. You can check out the 48 words at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8976889/Oxford-Word-Year-expanded-LIST-2020-unprecedented-12-months.htmlWhile most of the words are pandemic-related, the editors also cast their net wide to capture how English around the world was used and include words which reference significant events and controversies in the West like Black Lives Matter (“BLM”, “defund”, “Juneteenth”), the US election (“mail-in”, “unmute”) and climate change (“net zero”, meaning a target of completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity.).

But I was unfamiliar with many other words like “anthropause”, meaning “global slowdown of travel and other human activities”, “hygiene theatre” (cleaning practices which give the illusion of sanitisation without reducing the risk of infection) and “Veronica bucket” which is specific to Africa and is “a type of sanitation equipment consisting of a covered bucket with a tap fixed at the bottom and a bowl fitted below to collect wastewater”.

One term on the list I find strange is “wet market”, described as South-East Asian in origin and to mean “a market for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce”. Aren’t wet markets ubiquitous in Asia, including China where Covid-19 supposedly first surfaced in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market?

What I do appreciate is Oxford Dictionaries’ tracking of regionally used English words and usage. I learned from a graphic on its website (https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2020/), for Malaysia, our word is “MCO” for movement control order, while in Singapore, it is “circuit-breaker” and in the Philippines, “enhanced community quarantine”.

A newly-coined word of 2020 I especially like is “covidiot” to describe “a person who disobeys guidelines designed to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”

While WOTY is an English language thing, it was actually started by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS or the Association for the German Language) in 1971. GfdS’ WOTY, announced on Nov 30, is “Corona-pandemie”, which doesn’t get lost in translation.

In Japan, the WOTY is “Sanmitsu”,

announced on Dec 1. This is the buzzword that succinctly combines the “Three Cs” on preventing Covid-19 infection, namely avoiding closed spaces, crowds and close-contact situations.

Closer to home, the 2020 Hanzi or Chinese character chosen by Malaysian Mandarin speakers is yi, meaning “epidemic”, while in Singapore, readers of a Chinese daily voted for the character zhao, meaning “cover” in reference to the widespread wearing of face masks.

I wonder what China’s 2020 character will be. For the past 14 years, its Chinese National Language Monitoring and Research Centre has looked for the one character or phrase to describe the country and the world in that year.

Last year’s character was wen or "stable" to show the state of the nation on the 70th anniversary of the founding the People’s Republic of China and “the Chinese people's wish to live a harmonious, stable and happy life”.

Beijing had wanted that stability and happiness to continue through 2020 but the pandemic upended that hope not just for China but for the whole world.

I couldn’t glean any information online for this year’s nominated characters so let’s see if China will announce its WOTY on Dec 20 like it did last year.

In the meantime, what's your personal WOTY? Mine is "stranded".

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.